Going into 2020 it's Bernie vs Biden and if Warren really wants to further the progressive cause she should consider backing Bernie as a Sanders/Warren ticket would do the trick, ensure her future presidency, and guarantee 16 years of progressive leadership to build the foundations for a major socialist movement in the USA. However "Our Revolution" and "Capitalist Bones" are cognitively dissident so Warren would have to tone down her ruling class rhetoric in praise of a system responsible for two world wars and the uncountable millions of deaths through exploitation, colonial and neo-colonial oppression, US military aggression worldwide and which is the foundation upon which all Nazi, fascist and neo-fascist regimes and military dictatorships are founded.
The opinions, views, thoughts, and ramblings of editors of PoliticalAffairs.net – and other stuff worth reading or viewing.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
NY State, Gov. Cuomo, an the Right to Marriage
Well, the issue is even deeper. Trump judges often have strange racist and anti-humanist views and many no doubt would refuse to officiate at a gay wedding. Cuomo blocked all this class of judges not just those appointed by Trump, but by Obama, Bush, etc. The state must protect the rights of all its citizens and prohibit and punish racism and discrimination which deny equal civil rights to all. The state should revoke the rights of everyone currently empowered to perform legally recognized marriages and require a special license granted by the state to be obtained by individuals who wish to conduct weddings and only recognise marriages conducted by properly licensed individuals who must have obtained a license by signing an application containing a pledge or affirmation to conduct weddings without any discrimination against any group of people who are subject to the laws of the state -- this includes gay couples, mixed race couples, undocumented couples, etc. The new law should become effective six months after enactment to enable all those currently allowed to perform weddings to submit their applications and become certified by the state. Religious bigots and others can still perform whatever ceremonies they wish but no marriages will be legally recognized unless performed by a certificated state sanctioned officiant. Anyone who refuses to conduct a marriage sanctioned by the state will have his license revoked and will no longer be able to perform legal marriages. [Enforcing Bill of Rights Socialism: the right to be married]
Monday, November 25, 2019
Elections in Hong Kong
"On Monday, Mrs. Lam said in a statement that the government respected the results of the election. “Many have pointed out that the results reflect the public’s dissatisfaction with the social situation and deep-seated problems,” she said, adding that the government would “listen to the views of the public with an open mind and seriously reflect on them.”
This is an opportunity for the two sides to work out compromises that will work for both. The election shows Hong Kong already has a democratic way to possibly solve the contradictions between the protest movement and the government and hopefully both the violent demonstrations and the police responses will be toned down. The leaders in Beijing should draw the correct conclusions from this vote and not over react nor should extremists in the protest movement try to provoke continued violence and appeal to hostile external enemies for support. The US especially should stay clear of this clearly internal affair of the Chinese people.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Cosmic Marxism
In one sense, the popular Marvel movie Dr. Strange represents the bourgeois
cosmic view perfectly. The Marvel universe here is one where both magic and
science exist mashed together. Here, magic is ‘real magic’, in the sense that
it is not mere tricks, illusions or special effects. This is because other
dimensions allow for this in the infinite multiverse, and it is possible to
cross between these universes, and to gain powers from these. Science, however,
is not as capable as magic, because it is limited. Usually it is limited,
however, only by the limited thought capabilities of the human subject in
question in the movie, the hero, who slowly comes to see the light.
What rules this multiverse, on the other hand, is
really a simpler logic than that of our Earthbound science: it is the
Manichaean law of good versus evil. And, in fact, here we find the logic of
journalese writ large as the usual array of competing ideas, some of which are taken
to be good ideas and some of which bad. Nevertheless, science and cosmology
also underpin this multiverse with its magic and good and evil forces and so
on, in this case here by the apparently scientific theory of the infinite
multiverse itself. Such theories are produced by ‘the world of philosophy’ and
‘the world of physics’ where they meet up.
To manage this meeting point there is a reliance on
certain figures and organs to act as the intermediaries, the popularizers of
science in the media. These intermediaries themselves require a body of
knowledge that they can draw from, knowledge that has been, so to speak,
pre-vetted to be politically safe and fit for purpose. Today, Marxism and
dialectical materialism, naturally, has been totally left out of our understanding
of the cosmos and physical reality in the media. Yet today we have quantum
entanglement (or “spooky action at a distance”), black hole singularities,
wave/particle duality, multiple dimensions, the uncertainty principle and
probability, and all these things seem to show up dialectical paradoxes like never
before. In fact, if you knew anything about Marxist philosophy you could be
forgiven for thinking that what we are seeing is a dramatic proof of the dialectics of nature.
Yet when the theory of uncertainty is called the
theory of indeterminacy, the critical aim is undoubtedly pointed at Marx and
his apparently old-fashioned deterministic materialism. What seems to be
justified in the modern world therefore is not Marx, or Hegel for that matter,
but Kant’s ‘uncertainty principle’ over the status of our knowledge, which it presented
as if it is a good match with Heisenberg’s principle. Just as we cannot know
the position and the velocity of an electron at the same time, according to
Heisenberg and quantum mechanics, likewise in modern ideology we also cannot
know the “Thing in itself” according to Kant, and these things are supposed to
be more than just analogous to each other. In the popular world they are the
foundation stones of both the multiverse and the doubt of the possibility of any
exact knowledge, so we have infinite possibilities coupled with infinite doubt.
At the same time, the fact that we can know this, that we know the structures
upon which everything is built at the smallest scales probabilistically, is in
any case treated as very valuable knowledge. Yet, as any Marxist knows, Kant
still does not get past Hegel’s refuting argument in his Logic: that to
know that you cannot know is knowledge. Arguably, it is precisely because
today’s world provides in physics and astronomy dramatic proof of the truths of
dialectical materialism that this philosophy is so proscribed.
To make our point, let’s just focus on one phenomenon:
Black holes.
Leonard Susskind can help us. We will ignore, in his
book on the subject, his awkward analogy in his introduction of ‘biological
hard wiring’ though; - suffice it to say we think it is the relative lack of
instinct that makes humans different to other animals, and that we can all
think of some pretty strange things with our imaginations, and have been able
to do so for a long time, in fact in the past I suspect it may have been easier
for us (such as the Pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosophers) than it is today,
given the amount of ‘help’ we have from the media.
Black holes are objects in space, collapsed or
imploded stars, which have so much mass and density that the gravity they
produce is so strong that at some point even light, which travels at 186,000
miles per second, cannot escape its pull, and therefore they appear black (to our eyes, the absence of light registers
as the color black). The object at the focus of the black hole is called a singularity, because it represents the
location where the density and mass are infinitely great, and its size is
infinitely small. Nevertheless, and this is the paradoxical bit, different
black holes can have different characteristics based on the amount of mass they
had initially or that they later pull in. For instance, if more mass should
fall into a black hole their mass gets larger, so this changes the size of what
is called their event horizon. The event horizon is the limit where the
gravitational attraction of the black hole becomes so great that any object
that passes this point will be unable to escape the fate of ending up in the
singularity.
Now, the area of the event horizon is always proportional
to the mass of the black hole. One might reasonably expect all black holes to
be the same, given they are all infinitely small and infinitely dense etc. and
all infinities must be equally infinite, yes? But being of different mass
changes them (also their rates of spin but we will leave this aside). If you
think about it, the mass of an infinitely small and dense object seems strange,
because it seems both infinitely heavy, and to have no mass at all because it
is infinitely small, simultaneously, and how could such a volume, as a thing,
generate different sizes of event horizon? Only the event horizon’s area
is changed, the singularity remains a singularity, a point with no dimension.
Physical objects which come near to the event horizon
of a black hole behave strangely. Near to the event horizon, because of the
greater gravity and its relativistic effects, everything slows down relative to
those things more distant from it. This slowing down is not just clocks, which would
tick slower (or at fewer intervals), but also the whole structure of matter,
e.g. it includes the atomic motions. This shows us that it is not just light
that is here affected by gravity, but all electromagnetic radiation and in fact
all of matter in motion. Its relative rate of motion is slowed by the intense
gravity. This also means that time is affected, or space-time. Therefore, a
person near a black hole (if they could survive) would age less relative to a
person more distant from it. This is true in normal life of the effects of
gravity on our planet too, but the effects are usually so small we do not
notice them, for instance a clock at sea level ticks slower than one at the top
of a high mountain.
The paradoxical nature of the black hole is understood
by a common ‘thought experiment’ performed by physicists: We imagine a person,
Bob, falling into a largish black hole, and another person, Alice, observing at
a safe distance, say, on a circling space station (I have switched the usual
roles for Bob and Alice as I got fed up with Alice always dying). Alice will
see Bob slow down as he approaches the event horizon, and the light that she
sees from him will become redder, because it is shifted to the ‘red end’ of the
spectrum because light is slowed and so the wavelengths are longer; and then,
as he approaches even nearer, he is smeared out and disintegrated. But,
although this must inevitably happen, Bob does not experience this. Because of
the equivalence principle, where in
free fall the effect of gravity is totally abolished, he sails on through the
event horizon and does not get disintegrated, he is still fine. Therefore, two
things happen that contradict each other, Bob is both alive and dead, he is in
a relativistic state, like Schrodinger’s famous cat.
We will come back to black holes in a moment, first
something else needs to be said.
The probabilistic nature of electromagnetic radiation
(or all matter in motion as such) is shown in the famous dual/particle wave
experiment (that has been repeated many ways) that shone a beam of light of
variable intensity through two slits and onto a phosphorescent board which
recorded the result. Light shone at very low intensity through the left slit
with the other blocked produced the effect of a single particle, a
photon, hitting the board, but at a location which could not be accurately
determined, i.e. it was uncertain.
However, when the intensity of the beam was raised (more photons), a pattern
was revealed, a blob a little to the left side. The same happened for the right
slit, but the blob was a little to the right. But what happened when both slits
were opened was that there was not a simple synthesis of the blobs but,
instead, a pattern emerged of stripes with gaps in between where no hits or
blobs of light were recorded, even though those positions were previously
covered by light (see Susskind 2008 p.102-3).
In short, light, which previously acted like particles
in the experiment, now acted like waves, and after going through the two slits was interfering with itself; this is
called an interference pattern. Some waves were reinforced by synchronizing
with other waves positively, but some were cancelled for the same reason but
negatively (peaks clashed with troughs), and thus produced no hits on the
board.
Although the above might seem to prove that the wave
theory had won the day, electromagnetic radiation also clearly acts like
quanta, as Einstein found. In fact, we know that the intensity of light
ramps-up by discrete steps, the smallest being one photon: Hence Quantum
Theory. The behavior of these discrete particles or quanta can be studied;
their laws of motion, combination and change can be understood. Therefore, we
have matter acting at the same time in two distinct ways, as a wave and as
quanta.
Planck’s constant (commonly denoted by h) is the smallest a product of mass and
the uncertainties of position and velocity can be. Planck determined that it
was possible to define the unit of the speed of light, unit of mass, and unit
of time each as 1, and the same as the Planck constant.
Coming back to black holes, the smallest a black hole
can be (Susskind 2008) is defined by the Planck length, time (half-life) and
mass (or energy).
Susskind tells us how Jacob Bekenstein worked out
something important in relation to bits of information, entropy, and black
holes. - We will forego the mathematics and just say that he calculated that
for every one-bit photon added to the black hole the area of the event horizon
increased proportionally by one square Planck unit. So, in effect, the information
that was presumed lost (at one point by Hawking) by being swallowed up in the
singularity still exists in the area of the event horizon.
(Stephen Hawking had proposed that black holes radiate
a certain amount of energy, by paired particles being separated, one going
inside and one coming out, at the event horizon, which eventually evaporates
them over a gargantuan period of time. With this evaporation the information
that fell into the black hole was thought to be lost forever, breaking the
fundamental rule of physics of the conservation of energy, or, which amounts to
the same thing, information; Susskind showed how this was not correct.)
So, we are seeing here two paradoxes that are similar:
The paradox of wave/particle duality and the paradox of what happens when Bob
falls into the black hole. Indeed, these two do become related in the
investigation of black holes, because any attempt to try to examine what is
happening to Bob as he gets close to the event horizon, say to look at him with
a light beam, would require under those conditions of extreme gravity a beam of
such intensity that it would also destroy him.
When Bob is past the event-horizon he can no longer
provide any information to the outside world because nothing can go faster than
the speed of light, such as radio, and light cannot escape the event horizon of
the black hole. Although he is still OK (equivalence principle), his fate is
sealed, and he will eventually be destroyed presumably at the singularity,
although really, we do not know for sure because nobody knows, and the laws of
physics break down inside this domain. In any case, no outside observer can
receive a message from Bob to determine what state Bob is in. As far as they
are concerned, he was destroyed at the event horizon. However, to the thought
experimenter, Bob seems to be, really, in two opposed states, both alive and
dead, at the same time. But this thought experimenter now thinks that this is
impossible because, naturally, no person can be both alive and dead at the same
time. Perhaps, either she is imagining the situation and communicating this to
the rest of us from a third position somehow ‘outside’ the two events, or this
thought experimenter has realized something important about certain
contradictions through the imagination.
This paradoxical state of matter in motion is already
described in physics as complementarity,
and as belonging to the principle of
complementarity (Niels Bohr; it is ironic that the
famous meeting in September 1941 during WWII between Bohr and Heisenberg, the
latter who was acting for the Nazis, is uncertain as to its actual content), which holds that objects have
certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or
measured simultaneously. Using this term, the paradoxical nature of the
phenomena is obscured, even though the way in which the thought experimenter
(the physicist) arrived at such a determination was via the concept of paradox
or contradiction, e.g. just as Susskind demonstrates in his book.
So, it seems to us that the
concept-term ‘complementarity’ displaces the concept-term contradiction in this place (and, actually, in
all science), even though the concept-term contradiction proved the most useful
concept during the actual process of scientific thinking about the problem. And,
in fact, the concept of ‘complementarity’ does not add any explanatory power
regarding the phenomena.
What function does this term serve, therefore? The
decision to favor the pragmatic term complementarity over contradiction
(consciously or not) we suggest has a reflexive action back on the imagination
that produced the thought experiment that helped the investigation of the
phenomenon in the first place. It is as if it is saying that the thought
experiment’s objects, contradictions,
were somehow bad or wrong, and so noticing them as paradoxical was wrong.
But think, if the experimenter had at first only seen
‘complementary’ phenomena, it is highly unlikely that the same sense of urgency
would have prevailed over the analysis of what was going on. The term ‘complementarity’
seems to close the debate by answering the question too quickly. But nobody
‘saw complementarity’, they saw
contradiction (it is noteworthy here that in color science color opposites are
also usually described as complementaries).
Consider Bob and Alice in their relation to that black
hole: A lot rests on the location of the third observer, i.e. the narrator of
the thought experiment, who is able, in their imagination (which we follow in ours), to think themselves in both
places simultaneously, in both Alice and Bob’s positions, whatever space-time
they may occupy. Bob from his position, close to the event horizon, seems to
the narrator to be in both an alive and a dead state, because this narrator can
see and understand Bob doing well, but can also see and understand from Alice’s
position, who sees Bob destroyed. If we call the narrator Charlie, it might be
said that Charlie cannot exist and therefore the problem of the contradiction
of Bob being both alive and dead does not arise, since Bob and Alice occupy different
‘relativistic light cones’ and are unable to experience things from each
other’s point of view. Does this mean that the simultaneous position of our
observer Charlie is impossible? No. Charlie’s position is imaginary as we said, and therefore can be outside the
space-time continuum that Bob and Alice are understood to be occupying.
This imaginary position is nevertheless ruled
suspicious, or even inadmissible, within Bob and Alice’s (and Frege’s, I
suppose) political universe, because it shows a dialectical materialist frame
of mind. Yet Bob and Alice are also a part of our imaginary and not really in
the real universe, - but for the sake of the argument, we can make this
distinction in our imagination: That Charlie does not exist in the same
space-time as Alice and Bob. Then the question becomes: Is it possible for
Charlie to see Alice and Bob simultaneously? Or, to put it more accurately: Is
all simultaneity ruled out in Alice and Bob’s universe if you do not occupy the
same space-time location? If so, Charlie can do something that is impossible in
the universe of Bob and Alice. However, we know that any imaginary Charlie (any
imaginary narrator of a thought experiment) can also perform this feat of
imagination within the same universe
as Alice and Bob (i.e. ours). So, the thought experiment is possible, and in
that thought experiment it is possible to do impossible things. In fact, the
ability to do impossible things in the imagination has led us to a lot of real
knowledge.
But, even if it is impossible (experimentally) to
simultaneously observe both Bob and Alice, i.e. to be with Alice as she watches
Bob get destroyed and be with unharmed Bob as he sails through the event
horizon whistling, does this represent a condition that is truly impossible in
the universe of any real Bob and Alice in relation to a real black hole? - Is
our imagination merely pretending that we can be in both Bob and Alice’s shoes
at the same time, but this is not possible, because (in reality) there is no
simultaneity? To achieve this in our actual universe, Charlie would have to be
both Bob and Alice at the same time,
which would require Charlie being in two places at once. The problem is time:
in this case study there is no mention of ‘same time’ so the apparent problem,
the contradiction, does not arise. Yet the imaginary situation arose in the
thought experiment in our universe for good reason. Alice can see Bob fall into
the event horizon and get destroyed, but if we think of Bob, we know from science that he will be OK,
because in his frame of reference his time is slowed and so he will remain
unharmed. Our imaginary circumstance, which this still is admittedly, is not
conflicting with the laws of nature.
Even though we cannot be in both shoes, so to speak,
simultaneously and for real, we can still understand this as a contradiction in
much the same way we can witness the dual particle/wave nature of light in
actual experiments. Alice’s time, which is speeded up, can see what to Bob
represents an eternity, so she may see his destruction. But if time is slowed
down for Bob, this is only relative to Alice’s time which seems speeded up to
Bob. We can imagine that Bob could observe Alice’s speeded up time, and Alice
could observe Bob slowed down and almost frozen time, but we cannot say that we
see both observing each other ‘at the same time’, precisely because they are in
different time frames, although in fact this is what we have just imagined in
order to think this scenario. On the other hand, we do know that Bob can pass through the event horizon unscathed, while
Alice will see him destroyed. So, the latter scenario does not depend upon the thought experimenter’s
unique position of observation, even though this may be what we do in the
thought experiment. The two things are true, Bob can be both alive and dead,
but we cannot really say that this condition of being in both states happens at
the same time, it is potentially
correct but not actually correct. It would be more correct for Charlie to
conclude that we may not say that she is both alive and dead at the same time we may only say that
she is in a potential state of
aliveness and deadness. This is similar for Schrodinger’s cat in the famous
thought experiment. The cat is potentially both alive and dead until we find
out exactly what state the cat is in by looking in the box. This potentiality
is ‘at the same time’, because for the entire period in which we do not know
the actual state we still know the potential and the whole period can be as
long a duration as we want.
Does this mean that the contradiction is solved for
Bob’s condition? No. Because we can calculate from the black hole event horizon
the amount of energy (information …) which would now include the dead Bob’s
body, but we still know that Bob would be OK. No matter how hard we try, the
paradox still asserts itself and appears to be fundamental rather than ‘only
imaginary’.
What is the status of the paradox? Clearly the
contradiction is not the same as one which finds two different answers from a
simple phenomenon, such as Susskind gives in his example of two thermometers
placed into boiling water and one reads cold and the other hot. That is not a
contradiction in our sense but a simple error. But because there is some
similarity between this kind of contradiction (error) and our kind, and because
problems like this can give rise to further knowledge, the two can be and are
often confused and conflated. Wave/particle duality is not an error, both can
be observed, and both form a very important part of physical science. Is it
simply that the instruments used to interrogate the phenomenon in question are
too crude that they cannot provide the answer (position and velocity)? No, because although it is true that using light
e.g. to study light changes the experiment, what this shows is that at this
level we are dealing with our embeddedness to matter in motion, which cannot be
changed. Observation and recording require physical processes like those
happening in the objects being studied. Does this mean that we cannot have
absolute knowledge of anything? It does mean that we cannot get beyond the
universe to observe it in a detached position like a god, but the answer to
that question is no, we can have absolute knowledge in the sense that science
has determined that we cannot do this, and this is absolute knowledge, or in
simpler terms, it is scientifically true.
Engels (1941, from his book, written between
1872-1882) gives us a way to understand the paradoxical (dialectical) and
apparently counter intuitive principles of quantum mechanics, which exhibit all
the features amenable to dialectical materialist thought, including the
Uncertainty Principle:
“Chance and Necessity. – Another
contradiction in which metaphysics is entangled is that of chance and
necessity. What can be more sharply contradictory than these two thought
determinations? How is it possible that both are identical, that the accidental
is necessary, and the necessary is also accidental?”
(…)
“In contrast to
both conceptions, Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of
propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just
as much also has no cause because it is accidental; that the accidental is
necessary, that necessity determines itself as chance, and, on the other hand,
this chance is rather absolute necessity (Logic,
II, Book III, 2: Reality). Natural
science has simply ignored these propositions as paradoxical trifling, as
self-contradictory nonsense. And, as regards theory, has persisted on the one
hand in the barrenness of thought of Wolffian metaphysics, according to which a
thing is either accidental or
necessary, but not both at once; or, on the other hand, in the hardly less
thoughtless mechanical determinism which by a phrase denies chance in general
only to recognise it in practice in each particular case.”
A note (by J.B.S. Haldane) to the above) says:
“Science is now
beginning to tackle these questions in connection with quantum mechanics, and
will doubtless find a way of expressing them less paradoxically than Hegel’s.
Meanwhile there seems to be little doubt that many of the laws of ordinary
physics are statistical consequences of chance events in atoms. But these
chance events are necessary, because, though we cannot predict what a given
atom will do, we can predict how many out of a large number will go through a
given process.”
It is interesting to note that a less paradoxical account is presented as desirable when in fact
such a paradoxical dialectical account obviously provides, as we have said,
such a productive impetus to the thought experiments that have led us to such
knowledge.
What we are seeing therefore is the detrimental
influence of bourgeois politics on science.
Gary Tedman
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Warren Retreats from Medicare for All
Ms. Capitalist Bones makes her first retreat. "Her latest proposal, then, is smoke and mirrors, a red herring—any cliche you like." She now wants the public option and will later work for a single payer system. This keeps the private insurance industry rolling along. Don't get me wrong, Ms. CB is still the most progressive Democrat (Bernie is an Independent Socialist and not part of the Democratic Party although he votes with the DP in Congress as an ally against the RP) but not as progressive as Bernie.
It is not a personal failing of Ms. CB that she is backtracking on Medicare for All but rather the logic of the capitalist system that the DP represents and she wants to work within that system and Bernie's Medicare for All smells too socialistic for the powers controlling the DNC. By taking this pro-capitalist position Ms. CB reduces official opposition to her and refocuses stronger opposition against Bernie. The same capitalist logic that destroyed Obama as a progressive (he is de facto opposed to both Ms. CB and Bernie) will also kill off most of the progressive programs that Ms. CB now advocates once she gets into office, that's why it is so important for class conscious workers and others who remain convinced in the viability of socialism to redouble their efforts to get Bernie the nomination and not fall for the right-wing labor leaders and their supporters who back Ms. CB and who also know which side of the bread their butter is on (not the socialist side). Bernie may lose and we get stuck with Ms. CB but until then, it should be Bernie or Bust.
Saturday, November 2, 2019
Trump versus Pentagon & Congress re Military Aid to Lebanon
The package is known as foreign military financing, which is major aid that is usually managed by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, part of the Defense Department." Talk about interfering in other people's countries! Here we give millions to a foreign army to carry out policies against domestic opposition groups the US doesn't like and to keep a government we approve of in power. Here the DNC, MSM, and CIA scream like stuck pigs because they think Russia put up Facebook pages against Killary! Imagine Putin funding the Mexican army to the tune of a hundred million dollars, or that of Venezuela. The US would go ape over that, yet it is business as usual for the US to do just that and even has a special government agency to do it. The ridiculous hypocrisy and childish outrage over alleged Russian meddling in our rigged election system via misleading Facebook pages or revealing the truth about Killary's campaign via unsecured emails is a sick joke compared to the actual deeds of US imperialism (arming and supporting rebel groups in Syria prolonging a destructive and failed attempt at regime change, plus wars and killings around the world on a mass scale) and people on the Left who fall for this garbage should be ashamed of themselves for playing the role of useful idiots for our monopoly capitalist ruling class.
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